Green River - Seattle's proto-grunge

Green River formed in 1983 in Seattle, out of the meeting of various musicians who had come from a number of seminal bands (Deranged Diction, Spluii Numa, Mr Epp, The Thrown Ups) from the American Northwest. By the time of their first EP, Come On Down, the line-up had settled around singer Mark Arm, guitarists Stone Gossard and Steve Turner, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Alex Vincent. Green River were among the first, alongside Melvins and Soundgarden, to forge a hard, granite-like, at times almost psychotic sound that would later be codified under the term grunge. Green River, in particular, managed to strike an original compromise between the hard rock of Led Zeppelin, the tracked-tank cadences of Black Sabbath and the dynamite-charged violence of the Detroit sound of MC5 and the Stooges; it was precisely this latter influence that set them apart from the rest of the scene. Being only lightly touched by punk, Green River's sound made them, paradoxically, closer kin to the urban metal of Jane's Addiction and Guns 'n' Roses than to the Northwest's alternative scene. Mark Arm, somewhere between Iggy Pop and Robert Plant, became one of the most compelling frontmen of his generation.

Green River's story begins with the EP Come on down. The title track shows off all the theatricality of Mark Arm's vocals, screaming like a man possessed, perfectly matched by the roar of Steve Turner's guitar. The first version of "Swallow My Pride" (later reissued on Rehab Doll) reveals a band still technically raw, but fiercely determined and sincere. Here the leader's powerful, brazen vocals ride atop a garage-rock guitar base with an MC5-like edge. The lyrics are tremendously lewd and betray a visceral hatred for politics, shared moral values, and bourgeois life in general; and it's precisely in the lyrics that Green River's iconoclastic spirit shines through, a spirit later picked up by the whole Seattle generation. After the release of Come on down, Steve Turner left the band, guilty, in his view, of overly mannered stage antics and of a songwriting approach more suited to mainstream acts like Iron Maiden, Kiss and Whitesnake than to a punk band.

With Turner replaced by Bruce Fairweather (already a veteran of Deranged Diction alongside Ament), the band produced the EP Dry as a Bone, arguably their masterpiece. The band was at its peak, and any technical shortcomings were well masked by Jack Endino's production, which instead managed to highlight their fervor and expressive urgency. Five tracks, five hard-garage-blues masterpieces. The record opens with "This Town", where the rhythm section traces a slow-fast dynamic that would become a hallmark of later grunge bands. The same dynamic defines "P.C.C.", where the initial Black Sabbath-like march evolves into a dizzying blues gallop. Here Mark Arm doesn't sing so much as scream to the point of near collapse, while Alex Vincent pounds the drums as if trying to destroy them rather than keep time. "Unwind" is one of the fastest blues numbers in rock history (with a pace almost worthy of Killing Joke), where the interlocking guitars and animalistic vocals leave the listener reeling. On "Baby Takes" the vocals are more controlled, yet at the same time bored and disgusted. The spotlight here falls on Gossard and Fairweather's guitars, locked in tight dialogue, backed by Vincent's drumming, which hammers away relentlessly from start to finish.

The songs' structure is always the same, but their sheer power and the sincerity of the lyrics made the band one of the most beloved indie acts of the period.

Meanwhile internal tensions began to undermine the band's stability, though they still managed to release their first and only LP, Rehab Doll. Although the record's quality is more than solid, the sound (now slower) seems to have absorbed some of the traits of formulaic hard rock. On many tracks the drums do little more than keep time (as on "Together We'll Never"); Mark Arm screams less, trying instead to blend his voice more with the rest of the instruments. Because of these changes, the album ends up setting a template, and indeed, alongside Soundgarden's "Ultramega OK" and Dinosaur Jr's "You're Living All Over Me", it would help establish a sonic standard that critics would come to call "grunge".

Still, some tracks would go on to become staples of the band's repertoire. The title track has a slow, menacing gait that reveals its kinship with Soundgarden and their shared debt to Black Sabbath. "Smiling and Dying", on the other hand, is a piece of fairly ordinary, washed-out hard rock. The album's masterpiece is perhaps "One More Stick", a dark ballad in which Dinosaur Jr seem to flirt with Sonic Youth.

Green River, however, had reached the end of the road. The lure of success for Ament and Gossard (who would go on to join Pearl Jam, via Mother Love Bone) clashed with Arm's punk attitude, which conceived of music as pure fun, never beholden to market logic (it's the eternal battle between music made to "sell" and music as artistic product, born of the artist's own expressive urgency, self-referential, indifferent to trends and mass taste; a dispute within which certain grunge bands, Nirvana and Soundgarden above all, would manage to strike a quality compromise). The band officially broke up in 1987, on Halloween night, during a show in Los Angeles opening for Jane's Addiction. The fight broke out between Arm, who wanted to set aside free tickets for friends, and Ament, who instead wanted to give them to some A&R people he had been courting.

Fate seems to have satisfied everyone. Mark Arm would go on to form Mudhoney (alongside Matt Lukin of the Melvins), enjoying complete creative freedom over the band's artistic direction, while Ament and Gossard would sell millions of records with Pearl Jam.

More than thirty years after the band's split, Sub Pop plans to release reissues of Dry As A Bone and Rehab Doll in 2019, both remastered and featuring a wealth of previously unreleased material. Both releases will also be available as limited-edition colored vinyl.

The spotlight thus returns to an artistic adventure that once seemed destined for permanent obscurity.

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